9:01AM EST–Blimp took off for its flyover of Raleigh 2 minutes ago.
1:20PM EST– The blimp should now be a few minutes into its fly around of Raleigh, NC. On a side note Elijah is working on getting streaming coverage on Justin.tv/RonPaulBlimp from inside and outside of the blimp live. He is also working on setting up the GPS.
I can't see it, but I'm outside of Raleigh proper as well.
maps.google happily accepts all of those (and many others, I’m sure) and brings up that map.
What do I get with live.com? North Dakota and Oregon
It seems, at best, odd that if I’ve already done the geocoding for you, that you can’t take coordinates and show me that map. Lots of people have GPS’s these days.
And, of course, the best proof of all - “it works with Google” :)
This was a fun spam to get in my gmail account - from google.com
It was a nice touch that the account name was “picasateam” just to help even more with the sense that this was real.
I’ve always found it interesting when people would trust a given company or financial institution less because of people sending spam claiming to be that company (PayPal, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc.). Now I wonder if it’ll happen to Google… well, and how long they take to shut down this kind of “hole”.
Since our forecast is full of thunderstorms and highs in the 90’s, I figured it was yet another time to go check what my wish-list home town was looking forward to:
It shouldn’t be surprising - notice that bottom-left chunk that’s actually got reasonable temperatures? Yup, that’s it. The 10-minute drive to Tijuana is a nice bonus.
James Manning [4:23 PM]: any idea if the way to call PPE with “quiet” has changed recently? James Manning [4:23 PM]: I vaguely remember it changing (because it broke us in the past), but I don’t remember for sure Mike Kok [4:23 PM]: No idea. James Manning [4:23 PM]: liar! James Manning [4:23 PM]: tell me the truth! James Manning [4:23 PM]: now! James Manning [4:24 PM]: I can tell you’re lying James Manning [4:24 PM]: your eyes shifted to the lft James Manning [4:24 PM]: left, too James Manning [4:24 PM]: your nose twitched, too James Manning [4:24 PM]: i can tell, even from my office over here James Manning [4:24 PM]: I have an intricate system of mirrors James Manning [4:24 PM]: don’t try to find them, i’ve hidden them far too well James Manning [4:25 PM]: i’m a friggin’ evil genius i tell you James Manning [4:25 PM]: …. maybe it’s time to switch to decaf Mike Kok [4:25 PM]: Um… Mike Kok [4:25 PM]: Yeah
According to Apple, the browser reached the landmark one million figure in the first 48 hours after release. Despite its six-figure downloads, Safari for Windows is a long way off the glory of Apple’s biggest Mac-to-PC crossover hit, iTunes, which has been downloaded over 500 million times by Windows users.
I apparently want to go work at ZDNet since a six-figure salary there is apparently at least one million a year! ;)
Okay, Microsoft, so you think you’re pretty cool because you managed to get some poor gormless fatty to tattoo himself with a Zune symbol? Well guess what? We’ve got a cutter. Yup. A bona fide total bad-ass Trent Reznor-loving Goth chick with an eating disorder, piercings, fake red hair and a half dozen personalities. And she’s friggin hot. Her name is Megan O’Rourke and she’s our VP of customer experience. She cut herself this morning to show that nobody is going to out-bad-ass Apple. Nobody. You get a tattoo? We carve our bodies.
Megan is one of our youngest VPs. She’s seventeen years old and lives in a halfway house in Campbell. Her parents threw her out after they caught her using crystal meth. Six months ago she showed up at 1 Infinite Loop and threatened to set herself on fire outside the building unless we gave her a job. I hired her on the spot. “Cutter Girl,” I said, “you are totally what our brand is all about.”
Today she sent me this photo via email, asking me to put it on my blog. Under the photo she wrote, “I did this for you, Steve.”
James Manning [10:25 AM]: is it normal that I have Wiggles songs running through my head all day every day? Jason Prickett [10:26 AM]: No. You should buy real music to listen to at work. Jason Prickett [10:26 AM]: Something like Dora the Explorer sings James Manning [10:27 AM]: swiper no swiping! James Manning [10:27 AM]: aw, man!
While Sarah and I were making her mommy a lemon meringue pie yesterday, we used lots of lessons from the Good Eats episode covering such creations. Proper separation of eggs (indeed, Alton’s quarantine approach works well, as I messed up the first egg), tempering the eggs as we introduced them to the lemon sugar mixture - it was very fun :)
Funny enough, the pie is still sitting on the stove - we’ve been eating other things this weekend and we haven’t gotten to it yet!
I visited Charlotte this past weekend and had a blast.
I got to:
Visit Microsoft’s Charlotte campus which I hadn’t been to before - it’s only about a mile or so from South Carolina.
Meet a few of the Microsoft-Charlotte guys I had been working with on some projects over the last couple of months face-to-face. That was pretty fun.
Pick up an Xbox 360 for Chad at our company store.
Go into the tallest building in NC (and the tallest between Philadelphia and Atlanta) to hang out with Chad (he handles some kind of investment banking thingy, I was lost in the details) Friday. Chad works on the 3rd floor, so it doesn’t take 30 minutes to get up to his floor :)
Help Chad find a couple of busted transactions ($81 million total, which seems like a lot to me except his day’s totals were around $60 billion)
See Chad’s parents (and his nephew) again, whom I haven’t seen in a few years. Chad was the one with the good basketball court at his house (concrete slab in the back yard), so we all headed over to his place for playing and hanging out :) Chad’s mom made (and still makes!) sweet tea the proper way - the water has to get HOT so you can get enough sugar into the solution :)
Meet Chad’s girlfriend (Mary Cat) for the first time. We had talked on the phone a couple of times (she was there when I had called Chad to catch up), but this was the first face-to-face meeting. She’s very sweet and friendly, and she’s really good for Chad. She lives down in Rock Hill, SC - about a 20 minute drive for him.
See Spider-Man 3 on the IMAX screen at Discovery Place in Charlotte. I liked the movie (go figure), but we sat too far up - it clearly was a movie not made for IMAX, as a bit too much of the focus was outside of the center of the screen.
Eat “ghetto Mexican” with Mary Cat and Chad down in Rock Hill.
Go to Mary Cat’s church (along with Chad, his parents, and his nephew) on Sunday.
Participate in the Eucharist during the service (communion wafer delivered by Mary Cat herself, even).
Normally Fidelity’s error messages are well-phrased - they do (IMHO) a good job explaining what the failing condition is (insufficient funds, for instance). However, in attempting a transfer between 2 accounts today, I got an error message from them that lacked any explanation of the failing condition.
To be clear, it wasn’t a “system is down” kind of issue - because of the nature of what I was doing, it seems likely to me that I’m triggering a bug in their software, so this may just be their “unhandled exception” / “unexpected error” message for all I know.
To be fair, here’s an example of one of their “good” error messages. It gives a great explanation as to the failure condition and gives available action options (I wish my product’s error messages were all this good :)
(120009) The dollar amount requested is greater than your available cash balance. Select the Back Button and choose a lower amount, or call a Fidelity Representative at 800-544-6666.
My fanboy-ism of the day. Of course it relates to PowerShell. I find myself wanting to write PowerShell scripts on my Ubuntu box on a daily basis now. :)
I got the question today of what my favorite Microsoft patent is - there’s a few that I really like, but my favorite happens to be one that’s not even a software patent - one that Ballmer even has his name on - 4,588,074 - a holder that lets you store books and similar things and also hold them open.
flavor
